The European Geosciences Union conference takes place every year in Vienna. It hosts around 15,000 scientists on all topics to do with geoscience. This year I was invited to take part in one of the daily press conferences they organise. The topic of the press conference was Past civilisational resilience and collapse.

Blog entry by Myrna de Hoop – PhD studentLand is essential to support life, ecosystems and food production. Due to population growth and environmental problems, land is becoming scarce. Especially in drylands, the deterioration in the quality of land is a problem. Dryland systems cover about 40% of the earth surface. Desertification in these areas directly affects about 250 million people. Various factors can cause desertification, such as climatic variations and human activities. My research focuses on rangeland management and the impact on dryland ecosystems. How could we anticipate desertification?

What brought about the fall of the Roman Empire? That is a question that has occupied Roman scholars for centuries. An equally important question is what enabled the Roman civilisation to last so long in a region of highly variable climate and dynamic landscapes? Environmental Setting

The heart of the Roman Empire was the Mediterranean and its surrounding ecosystems. Much of Mediterranean is marginal for agriculture with low rainfall and highly variable climate making droughts and famine a real and constant threat. Equally, proxy data show that climate in the Mediterranean underwent long-term changes during the lifetime of the Roman Empire (Fig. 1). Land degradation was also a serious problem in the Roman period, particularly with a shift to large-scale farming in the Late Republican period to feed a growing urban populous. The impact of land degradation in Italy was outlined in the writings of Lucretius dating from 99 – 55 BC: